 Aloha, Namaskar, and hello. Welcome to Climate Change Beyond Outrage, where we go beyond outrage to focus on solutions to climate problems facing people, nations, and the world. I am your host, Anu Hital, broadcasting live from ThinkTech Studios in beautiful downtown Honolulu. There are many ways for you to get talking with us. You can join our conversation by tweeting us at thinktechhi and now you can call us at 415-871-2474. Once we're done with the show, don't feel bereft. Join our conversation on our Facebook page of the same name, Climate Change Beyond Outrage. In today's episode, we focus on oceans. Oceans that make up three-quarters of the earth's surface. Oceans face many threats, most of which are human-induced. To help me tell the story of the challenges oceans face and the efforts to help rescue them, I have with me Pierre-Yves Cousteau, who runs Cousteau Divers. According to their website, by uniting a community of divers who are concerned about the marine environment, Cousteau Divers brings the legacy of Jacques-Yves Cousteau to life, making each diver an agent of the study and conservation of the aquatic realm. Pierre-Yves is also a Goodwill Ambassador to the IUCN, which is the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, which just had its large 10-day Congress here. Pierre-Yves, welcome. Thank you. Aloha. Aloha. It's nice to have you in Hawaii and nice to have you on the show. Thanks. It's great to be here. And so you came here for the IUCN Congress, for the World Conservation Congress. But before we get into that, would you tell us a little bit about the challenges that oceans face and what is Cousteau Divers doing to help with that? Sure, absolutely. So there is no single threat right now on the oceans. It's a combination of things that we're doing to the oceans that are really starting to jeopardize its well-being. It's, I'd say the three major threats are climate change, pollution, which include plastic pollution, and overfishing. So by changing the chemistry of the water and by taking out most of its fish through overfishing, basically we're eroding the resilience of the ecosystems, making them a lot more fragile and a lot more susceptible to die in case of brutal events. And yeah, these three things, climate change, pollution, overfishing, they're actually, when you look at them, they're just symptoms of a greater problem. They are what business as usual calls externalities. And addressing the root causes, which is our current socioeconomic model that we live in, I think is the way we should be going rather than trying to put band-aids on all these symptoms. We should really start to rethink our societies, rethink the way we live with nature and with each other in order to stop having these negative externalities that are devastating the planet. And sorry to keep going about this, but the oceans feed about a billion people on this planet. They produce half the oxygen you're breathing right now. And they buffer climate change, they hold 90% of the excess heat that we release into the atmosphere. So they provide services that go beyond just enjoying nature and enjoying life and enjoying mammals and dolphins and sharks. They're providing benefits that keep us alive, literally. And of course you have seen this firsthand because you've been diving from a very young age. And you've been, you come from a family of divers. Any relation to Jacques Cousteau? Yes, actually there's a big one, other than the nose. There's also the fact he was my father. And so obviously you have the ocean in your blood, so to speak. We all do, actually. Our blood chemistry is very, very simple. We all do. And you more so than some of us land lovers. But you know, so how did you get started with Cousteau divers? And tell us what, you know, what is Cousteau divers doing to help with some of these, to help solve some of these problems. So six years ago I launched Cousteau divers. I was working as a diving instructor in Greece. And I realized that I didn't want to be just a passive observer of the degradation of destruction of marine life. So I decided to start my NGO, Cousteau Divers, leveraging the power of the Cousteau brand and name in order to empower people who care to give them the tools to help them study and protect marine life. So it's a citizen science organization. What that means is that we ask people who are passionate about nature but are not necessarily scientists to report some observations that can then be useful for the better understanding of the oceans. And so these are divers that are reporting back on some of the things they're seeing? Yep, divers and freedivers. What's the difference? So freedivers don't use tanks. They don't use scuba equipment. They just go in a breath hold. Oh, they go very deep. I was just recently on an expedition to the Galapagos with a French free diving champion, Guillaume Néry, who reaches 400 feet in breath hold, which just blows my mind. I'm just starting in that. How long do you have to hold your breath to do that? I don't know. How long is this? It was probably around two minutes, something like that. Oh, oh my gosh. Okay. But it's also very interesting that just to go back to the Cousteau divers just to explain a little bit what we're doing is taking people that are passionate about the ocean, be they freedivers or scuba divers, and asking them to report observations. And what I launched last year is Project Hermes. It has nothing to do with the luxury brand. It's the messenger god in the Greek mythology. And the idea is that all these scuba divers and freedivers for the past 10 years have been recording the temperature of the ocean using their dive computers. And today we don't have that data. Nobody knows the temperature of the ocean in real time in shallow waters, coastal areas, where most of marine life is. So the idea is to centralize all these data, people sending us their dive computer data, so that we can hack the ocean, we can reveal the temperature of the ocean in real time worldwide, which is necessary to understand how the ocean works, how it stores and releases energy. So is a dive computer, I know nothing about diving because I feel terrified of diving. I do snorkel and I swim, but I don't like to go way deep down under and let alone have to hold my breath. I can fix that if you want. It can go out together. Right, there's a reef out here. We can do something. We don't have to go very far. But do divers go out with computers then? Yes, every diver must dive with a dive computer. And the computer is usually telling them what? The main function of the dive computer is to tell you how long you can stay at a given depth without going into what they call decompression. So how much you're saturating your tissues with nitrogen during your dive. So the computer will say, oh, you only have three minutes left at this depth. You have to go up. So that information, in addition to that information, there's other information that computer is collecting. Exactly. Okay. Temperature is being recorded by these computers, although it's not one of the main functions of the computer. They are and they have been recording temperature for the past 10 years. And so that's what you're now trying to centralize that data, absolutely. And so I noticed on your website, and we have a couple of screenshots of your website of maybe we can put that up on the screen, that there are people who are sending in both images. I don't know, well, you explain. Yeah. Explain what's going on here. So basically the dive, the website, KristoDivers, records photos and videos. So if you're a diver, you just upload your photos and videos and these dive temperatures from the new project I launched. So basically the idea behind the photo is that anyone can send their photos of underwater stuff. Are there particular parameters for the photos? Right now, no, because we're trying to get as many people as possible to do it. So they upload pictures and they just have to say where and when. Right. That's what I noticed. I clicked on Africa and then it said there are these many images from that region. And then it showed me all the, and then when I clicked on it said, this is where and this is when it was right there. That's right. So that we can hopefully in the future go through these images with algorithms or people. And through citizen science, basically identify which species were present when and where. So these, this tells you where people have registered and recent activity. Recent activity, yes. Absolutely. And that's all over the world. Yeah. The great thing about the Kristo legacy and the Kristo brand is that it resonates with a lot of people worldwide and there's a great opportunity to use that for good, to use that to get people involved in conservation and citizen science and to get them really to do something about. Well, how did this idea come to you? I honestly, I don't know. I was diving in Greece and I just realized I have a powerful name, but the most powerful way to use it is to empower others. And you just thought this would be a good, because there are other citizen science projects. I know of one on land, but I've never heard of one in the ocean and this is perfect because it's very similar to what they're doing on land. They're looking at, it's called project budburst and they look at when things flower, fruit and so on, you know, it's just the phenology, what biogeeks would call phenology. So there is that and they send that into a centralized database and then you can make sort of climate predictions and look at, it's basically that collection of data and it's against citizen science. You can do it once, you can keep going back to that spot. Is that similar for your? Absolutely, yeah totally. As citizen sciences have been well developed on land, a little bit less so underwater, but they're starting to do so. There are some more advanced programs that require that you lay out transects, that you count fish and things like that. We're staying away from that just because it's more of a niche and specialized thing and we're trying to appeal to anyone who gets in the water. So really dumbing down the science to increase the amount of data we get. Keeping it simple but at the same time very extensive so that people can join in. Absolutely. Yeah so that's how you got started and Cousteau Divers has been going on for six years now. What do you do with this data? So the idea behind this data is to be able to basically feed it into the world ocean database so that the temperature data becomes available. There's a lot of potential applications for the data. Who runs the world ocean database? I want to say it's NOAA. It's NOAA? So you were an intern with NOAA? With NASA. Oh NASA. Yeah this is another lifetime when I was studying astrobiology. Oh right okay okay. With NASA and the European Space Agency. Okay. But my activities have changed quite a bit and Cousteau Divers now is most of my activities including my work with IUCN as a consultant. But what I'm doing now is I'm on a six month global journey to go back to all the places my father visited and to see what changed. To witness the difference between when he was there and when I'm going now and understand why why did we why did things get better or why did they get worse and try to understand. So is Hawaii one of those places? So my father was did not make a film about Hawaii. Oh he didn't. Oh my gosh. So you're going to correct that. I'm going to correct that. I'm making it right now as you speak. That's right. I'll start releasing these mid-october on social media so if you guys want to follow me and you know and tweet. We'll tweet about that as well. Yeah so we'll take our cues from you whenever you're ready to tweet. Yes. We tweet those. And I'll just keep talking. Yeah so do you actually so are you making movies about your your travels with the view towards sort of seeing how they are different from what your father saw? Yes absolutely and the idea is also to help raise awareness to the importance and the beauty of the oceans that people start caring and protecting the oceans. One of the stops on my journey so far has been to Greenland. Greenland is a lot of ice as you know it's like a mile thick of ice. That's all the time. It's really really thick and there's a research station right there and I spent some time with the researchers there and they're looking at the ice cores and looking at the bubbles of air, old his air that's in the ice site and what they're saying these researchers they're at the forefront of climate research they're saying well we've already baked into the ocean a 30 feet sea level rise. That's coming our way right now and we don't know how long it's going to take. Is it going to be 20 years, 50 years, 100 years? But we've already baked it in there because the last time through geological eras that there was 400 ppms of CO2 in the atmosphere that's how high the sea level was consistently. So it's already there we've already baked that in the ocean people have a hard time understanding the inertia that goes with the liquid element rather than the the air element so let me illustrate this if you take a lighter and you put your hand over it it burns right if you take the lighter out it stops burning because the inertia is very low. If you boil water put your finger in it it hurts. If you take it off the boiler and you put your finger it still hurts for a long time. There is a thermal inertia in water and we've baked into the ocean already a lot of sea level rise and a lot of things so you know we need to do something about climate change really soon because the consequences we've already worked them into the system. And we're going to talk more about that in your role with the IUCN when we come back from the break so don't go away be sure to tweet us and ask questions or call us so we'll see you in just a minute. Hey how you doing uh welcome to the Bachi Talk my name is Andrew Lening I'm your co-host and we have a nice program here every Friday at one o'clock Think Tech Studios where we talk about technology and we have a little bit of fun with it so join us if you can thanks aloha. Hi I'm Stacy Hayashi with the Think Tech Hawaii show Stacy to the rescue highlighting some of Hawaii's issues you can catch it at Think Tech Hawaii on Mondays at 11 a.m. Aloha see you then. Aloha I'm Kirsten Baumgart Turner host of Sustainable Hawaii thanks for watching Think Tech this summer we have a lot of terrific shows of great importance and I hope you'll watch my show too every Tuesday at noon as we address sustainability issues for Hawaii they're really pertinent as the World Conservation Congress approaches in September and the World Youth Congress that's focusing on sustainability next year as well have a great summer and tune in at noon every Tuesday Aloha and welcome back to climate change beyond outrage I am here with Pierre Yves Cousteau and we are talking about climate change and oceans and his work so to go right into it let's talk a little about your role with the IUCN the international union for the conservation of nature you're here in Hawaii because they had their World Conservation Congress you are one of the Goodwill Ambassadors in in such company as Jane Goodall who is also one of those ambassadors and of course a real household name just as your father was so what do you do with as a Goodwill Ambassador and I know that one of the things they said is that your breath of fresh air to involve some of the young people and to bring the younger generation into conservation issues what would you how would you plan to bring them into conservation issues how do you plan to reach out to them and what would you tell young people about these things okay so I've actually recently last year I joined the IUCN as a marine program officer so I worked for IUCN directly not just being an ambassador and a figure for their work the conservation work but also working in the team the marine team at IUCN working on issues such as high seas governance 50% of our planet is beyond national jurisdiction 50% of this planet belongs to no one and everyone and it's a wild west so that's a big issue that that needs to be considered for the future we work also on plastic pollutions on creating innovative finance models for marine conservation to incentivize the financial industry to come in and step into the conservation world and hopefully expand the protected areas because we need more marine protected areas and so we're also working on sea mounts doing different expeditions there's really cool stuff that IUCN is doing for conservation and they did come up with a resolution to protect 30% of the world's oceans and of course the whole announcement for Papa Hanomo Kuwakia Marine National Monument to quadruple in size is sort of hopefully a way of ratcheting up ambition for other countries as well absolutely yes yeah and um no that's that's absolutely true and you know I gave a TEDx talk a couple years ago and basically I was saying in the Mediterranean Sea we have less than five percent that's protected but if we did the opposite if we protected all of it and started fishing in only 10 or 20 percent of it we would catch more fish than we're catching now and we would let the ocean recover we would never jeopardize it we would be catching more fish and we're catching now if we inverted things so instead of being 10 20 30 percent of ocean protection why don't we spin it around 10 20 percent of fishing areas protect the rest yeah it'll become so full of life in those 30 30 percent and that's something that E. O. Wilson at Harvard University he also says that you know in his book Half Earth he says that we can actually set aside half the earth you know but I like your take which is let's talk about the increase what people are getting not what they're giving up yes absolutely and um well so another highlight for me was speaking in front of the members assembly which is a thousand NGOs and a hundred governments and telling them just what I told you earlier which is you know plastic we were talking about plastic pollution specifically it's just a symptom you know the oil industry is heavily subsidized 500 billion dollars a year goes into oil and gas as subsidies for 50 billion dollars goes into overfishing like your your taxes and my taxes right now serve to increase climate change and to deplete the oceans even more is that a message for our young people to know well I think it's a little bit of a it's definitely something that you know so that they can put pressure it's outrageous and I think we need to step up to our government and say we don't want to keep subsidizing things that are destroying our planet let's stop subsidizing those things um but I you know for for younger generations what I say is do what you love do it really well and then use that to make the world a better place you don't have to be a marine ecologist you don't have to be a politician or something whatever it is for the oil industry whatever whatever it is you're working if you're doing something you love yeah then you have your heart in it and you can and you can use that to make the world a better place so we need that greening everywhere not just we need a cultural shift inside our societies yes we need to love and to care for nature to realize our indiscernible bond with nature we are nature we're not there's not nature here and us here it's we're just part of it and and we need to change the way we conceive living together I think with nature and make peace with nature now speaking of nature there is this wonderful place on this earth called the Galapagos yes and you've been there recently and you've been working there absolutely um I was there recently shooting a documentary called the Galapagos Evolution that should come out in the coming weeks or months and uh it was about free diving in the Galapagos we set aside the equipment the diving equipment and we went in on a breath hold and that allowed us to get so much closer to the animals I was inside the schools of hammerhead sharks I was one of them and just it just blurs those lines between you and nature you know and it's one of those could you hear them well sharks don't make noises that we can hear uh-huh but I did hear a humpback whale singing and dolphins clicking and whistling amazing so it's it's really profoundly changing experience and I strongly encourage by the way people and and younger generations I think the first step is to go out into the sea go and swim go and dive put on a mask go experience it I have great friends here in Haleiwa who are taking people out to swim with sharks uh one ocean diving and it's great because you know they're trying to reconcile man and sharks which sharks are traditionally are kind of our enemies you know and and they're really not traditionally I would say recently well I disagree with that view that jaws change the world I don't think that's true yeah I mean I know they're in the Hawaiian tradition they've reviewed sharks for a long time that's extremely interesting and I'm glad you mentioned that because I think traditional knowledge not just in Hawaii but everywhere in the world has a huge role to play in reconciling man in nature and in teaching us new ways of living together so I think really traditional societies here and elsewhere will increasingly have an important role to play in conservation of nature I know that at the IUCN congress they uh now they've included indigenous peoples as a category of membership as well so you don't have to be a state or an NGO or so that's I think that's a step in the right direction oh absolutely and most of the last remaining pristine places on this planet are under their custody so you know they we need to to they need to teach us how to a lot of things about their culture that we need to adapt I think into our consumerist culture that we become more in tune with nature and more in tune with living together what would you say to young people who are not interested in becoming less consumerist even if you know so you say that they should do what they love well what if they love going shopping and they love to buy things and I would say I would say be conscious of the conditioning you have realize that your mind is influenced all the time right now it's being influenced by me and you but every time you see a billboard every time you see an advertising just see how these they seep into your mind and create desires that are not necessarily yours and when you realize that all that psychological ecosystem you have your own ecosystem your nature your inner nature is influenced by what you see and what you choose in your life then you can start making it the way you want it to be not just be a victim of advertising and media and television and politics so it's about just take being conscious of that conditioning and trading goods for experiences go out you know instead of spending money doing buying an object that'll be obsolete in a year's time go out and travel and dive and see nature and see the world and meet people because those are the things that ultimately will stay with you not the things you buy so that's that's very interesting because of course to do all of these things and to be conscious and so on you need to be awake and not apathetic and it's been said that this generation even though it is service-minded the millennials and so on even though that they're service-minded they are still apathetic to their surroundings and to their environment maybe because they feel that there is no solution to this huge problem absolutely I think we're hammered all the time with fear and you know horrible things that are going on on the news and things like that so when you see that these problems are global they're huge they're all over and you get this helplessness and you're like well there's nothing I can do about it you know so then I think you just shut off your empathy which is dangerous and I think one way of reconnecting is basically finding something that has an impact empowerment doing something and watching its consequences so you know whatever it is there's one thing you can do in your household if you can tell you know your parents to stop using disposable plastic water bottles well yeah if you can just cut down a little bit on your meat consumption you know those are little things you do in your everyday life that have a lot of impact refusing single-use plastic cutting down on meat consumption being vocal you're not alone like I think a lot of people care about nature but they don't have a place to talk about it and they feel almost like you're ostracized from society because you care about nature which is weird right that's how materialistic we've gotten but you're not alone like there are thousands of people who really care about nature and who are doing amazing things right now young people with NGOs dynamic projects you know bringing people together movements are starting so there's a lot of exciting things going on a lot of things to be part of that will have an impact that do have an impact people don't realize that we are constantly broadcasting values and you can choose which values you broadcast and you by doing that you influence the people around you and you change the world every single day with every word that comes out of your mouth you are changing the world so I think you're right you need to be awake you need to to be conscious of that but thanks to you and thanks to shows like this you know we can get these kind of messages out well tell us before we leave we just have a minute or so left but before we leave what was it like the first do you remember the first time you went into the ocean and dived absolutely I used to be afraid of water I used to be afraid of water I was I was terrified of water when I was a kid and one day I was at the pool um on you know with the rest of my class and everyone was jumping in the water in a neat little line and I didn't want to go I was afraid I was terrified and I just said you know what I'm just gonna do it I'm just gonna overcome that fear I'm gonna jump in the water I'm gonna swim and I did and I was never afraid again so I was nine years old when I dove for the first time with my father and it's just I'm just in love with the ocean and every chance I have to reconnect with it and to protect it and to do hopefully raise awareness about the importance and the plight of the oceans yeah he must he would be so proud of you and you must have been so proud of you as you were growing up as well but I think that knowing in a way you know you are your own pioneer with your citizen science in the marine area and just as he was a pioneer so are you and I feel like it's sort of come full circle feel very honored to have you here thank you very much I also like this quote by your father which I've used in my show before but I think it's an honor and it's very appropriate for me to use it here today so if you don't mind me saying his words the sea the great unifier is man's only hope now is never before the old phrase has a literal meaning we are all in the same boat and I like that one because more than even maybe before he knew well he probably was working with climate change issues because we've been working with climate changes for a long time so but it must be very gratifying to know that you know these things are things you can carry on and fight the good fight you know I have another quote of his and it's in substance because I don't have it exactly but protecting the environment is a way of extending ourselves in every possible way through love through knowledge the creation and through you know just marveling at life amazing complex life is so it's not boring and never dull day when you're working in conservation and it gives meaning to your life it gives a purpose well thank you so much for the good work and for being here thank you and we look forward to seeing those videos those movies so and we will be back in another special broadcast at some point but catch us on youtube and twitter and facebook so aloha namaskar and goodbye